When Jorun flies above the ruined imperial palace:
"An owl hooted somewhere, and a bat fluttered out of his way like a small damned soul blackened by hellfire." (p. 274)
So the Galactics retain myths and metaphors of souls and hell. Is this black bat a fitting image for those who had dwelt in Sol City and its palace? Jorun has just been reflecting on their nobility, splendour, evil and wistfulness. The current dwellers are cats, owls, bats and hawks.
"He didn't raise a wind-screen, but let the air blow around him, the air of Earth." (ibid.)
Jorun wants to experience the Earthly elements like the couple who stepped out into the rain here.
He meets Taliuvenna who:
"...came from Yunith, one of the few planets where they still kept cities, and was as much a child of their soaring arrogance as Jorun of his hills and tundras and great empty seas." (p. 275)
We want to be shown more of this Galactic civilization.
Future histories have different aliens. In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, human beings build a Solar Union, then a Stellar Union, and encounter Nerthusians, Alori etc whereas, in Anderson's Technic History, human beings build a Solar Commonwealth, then a Terran Empire, and encounter Ythrians, Merseians, Cynthians, Wodenites etc but really there is no reason why the same aliens cannot exist in different future histories as human beings do. In James Blish's Haertel Scholium, the inhabited planet Lithia is destroyed in 2050 in A Case Of Conscience but exists millennia later in The Seedling Stars.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Except Anderson became dissatisfied with the Psychotechnic series and eventually abandoned it. A small reason for that might have been being convinced his treatment of what non-humans might be like was not convincing. And his treatment of non-humans in the Technic stories was much better.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I was reminded of a story I read about Mehmed II, the conqueror of the remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. After seizing the City he wandered thru the ruins and roofless halls of the Great Palace* quoting to himself a Persian poem describing how only the bat and spider now dwelt in the palace of the Caesars.
Ad astra! Sean
*The later Eastern Emperors vacated the Great Palace to live in the smaller Blachernae Palace.
Post a Comment